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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: Special Collector's Edition
The most vapid, yet financially successful, of all the Star Trek movies may not rise to the galaxy-spanning Space Operatics that make us Trekkers all giddy. Nonetheless, Voyage Home found huge success by being a humorous romp with beloved characters in an entertaining, relentlessly mainstream action-farce. Continuing the story spun in the previous two movies, Voyage Home finds the crew of the late, great starship Enterprise forced to travel back in time to the "primitive, paranoid culture" that is 1987 San Francisco. There they must find a pair of humpback whales, then bring them to the 23rd century to save the world from a mysterious alien whatzit. Voyage Home mines the "fish out of water" comedy potential for all it's worth and then some. Kirk's "double dumb-ass on you," Chekov's "noo-clee-ur wessels," Scotty's interaction with a Macintosh computer, and Spock's attempts at 20th century "colorful metaphors" are memorable (for better or worse) high points. Catherine Hicks costars with, of course, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the rest of the familiar cast. Paramount's Special Collector's Edition offers a fine anamorphic widescreen (2.35.1) image with DD 5.1 audio, then pours on more extras than any Trek DVD so far. Nimoy and Shatner come together for the commentary track, and there's another Okuda text commentary too. A wealth of featurettes cover real-world thinking on time travel, the language of whales, some Trek fanzine-like puff pieces, and plenty on the movie's production, chiefly a new docu called "Future's Past: A Look Back." Dual-DVD keep-case.
—Mark Bourne
